A Good Configuration For Calendar

Like with email, I have struggled to find a good configuration; unlike email, I haven't found a perfect solution, but I have found a reasonably good one. Google has a fairly good online calendar system, and I wanted to use that because I use their other services. The configuration I have now provides the following benefits:

• Synchronization between iCal on my Mac and Google Calendar
• The Google Calendar is on my Google Apps private domain
• Able to have multiple calendars
• Able to subscribe to the shared public calendars of other people and organizations
  
• The subscriptions occur in Google, not on my Mac
  
• All the calendars are on Google; none of the data is exclusive to my Mac
• Protection in the case of a system crash
• Available on the web when I am away from my computer
• Gives me alerts via email, as popups on my computer, and on my iPod

The first step is the most important one of all, and the one that I discovered late: go to iCal and delete all of your calendars, which might just be your default calendar. When I created a new event, I wanted that to automatically be part of my main Google Calendar, but the events were always added to my Mac calendar.